by Kris Radish
A young woman across the room smiles at the kind man. She waits for the applause to stop and then she says that being stranded at the airport like this is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. She’s sitting on the floor with her long legs crossed and tucked up under her, and she’s crying. It looks as if she has been crying for a very long time.
“I’m on my way to my mother’s funeral,” she tells them. “She died just last night, before I could get there, before I could say goodbye, before I could just look into her eyes one last time and tell her something, tell her maybe just one thing that I have needed to say for a very long time.”
The woman sitting next to her reaches out to put her arm across her shoulders and everyone can hear her say, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll say it anyway when I get there,” the young woman continues, looking up and into the eyes of everyone who is listening. “I’ll tell her I love her, and why I was never able to say it when she was alive will be part of the traveling funeral I take with me until I can figure that out.”
Enough, Katherine finally decides.
She stands with the shoebox under her arm and directs the group toward celebration. Waving her free hand across the room, she orders everyone to their feet and to their drinks and to a junction where they can hold their lost loves in a place of honor and delight.
“Our Annie could only take so much sadness,” she explains. “On your feet, dance if you must, celebrate the life that was before the death and what it gave you and what you have even now.”
Then the Minneapolis airport does just that. While a staggered line of airplanes waits under dark clouds that serenade an entire afternoon, a rumba line snakes through one concourse after another driven by one woman wearing red high-topped sneakers, with four wearing identical shoes scattered throughout the line, and one hanging on to the back end with the ashes of Annie G. Freeman bouncing gently under her right arm.
27
* * *
It is 6:30 P.M. and four hours past the time when the traveling funeral should have touched down at the Seattle-Tacoma airport and departed for a small road trip to the ferryboat dock and a ride to an island not far from the last boat landing.
“What are they saying on your end?” Marie, who is standing with her hands over her ears because the entire airport seems to now be engaged in dancing, drinking or some other fancy form of waiting that has spun off from the funeral discussions and the brazen talk just a few hours before, asks her husband.
“You may never leave the airport,” he tells Marie, laughing before he hangs up. “From the news reports I have been hearing, all the airports are a mess from here to Minneapolis.”
Katherine confirms this news and says that airport officials are hopeful that as soon as the storm passes they can begin sending planes out and receiving them from the West Coast but the snarl of backlogged planes could mean delays for hours and hours—maybe even a day.
“Look through those papers Annie sent you,” Marie orders. “Is there any kind of contingency plan in there?”
“I think that’s what she wanted us to figure out,” Katherine replies. “We’ll have to make some kind of decision soon about what we do next. I bet Annie wasn’t focusing on one more thing messing up her plans and I’m thinking that we can probably hang just a bit longer and then decide. What do you think?”
Marie wants to say that she’s tired of thinking and even more tired this moment of doing. She’d like to say how the funeral break was this huge beaming light at the end of her week, the week before and two years before that. She wants, right this very second, to lie down right where she is and have someone put a blanket over her. She’d like to have her feet tucked in and a warm drink right next to her right hand. She’d like to take a really long nap and know that it doesn’t matter when she wakes up and she’d like her entire family to be locked inside of the house while she dozes so she knows they are all safe and she won’t have to worry about them.
“Marie?”
“Sorry,” she answers. “I was dreaming that I had nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep and be, well, Marie.”
Katherine laughs and asks her if she’s tired.
“Like the rest of the women in the world, yes, I am tired but it’s not anything this break in my routine can’t take care of for a while anyway,” she explains. “So?”
So, they decide to wait just a bit longer and see if they can get a flight out or if they should find a bus or take the train or maybe just walk.
“I’m a good waiter,” Marie tells Katherine. “In a way it’s kind of exciting not to know what is going to happen next. So many parts of all our lives are predictable.”
“Absolutely, especially the past few weeks,” Katherine agrees as they decide to just wait it out a bit longer.
Marie leaves to tell the others they are just hanging for a while and Katherine finds a chair by the window and sits, alone, with Annie’s ashes on her lap and her ankles crossed so that her red tennis shoes can bounce against each other. She knows she’s guarded the ashes and Annie’s place in her life with what she hopes has been a fine mix of seriousness and frivolity up to this point and she decides, just then, at that moment that she is also tired and yes, Marie, it would be wonderful to lie down and take a nap.
Which is what she does suddenly and without any thought beyond the tiredness that has grabbed her by the back of the neck and seems to push her down into the next seat. Katherine rolls her hips into the most uncomfortable chairs ever designed, pushes herself against the shoebox and falls asleep so fast she does not feel her left foot drop or the blanket from inside the bag of the mother next to her slide gently around her shoulders.
She dips into a place of dreams so fast it is amazing that she was able to walk to the chair and sit down without falling into a coma. Her legs jump, and the woman—the mother next to her who was a witness at the recent airport funeral and who wept when everyone told their stories—touches her as gently as she touches her own babies when they dream and move at night so that they will know they are safe and they can feel the anchor of her arm holding them.
Katherine goes far away and she travels past faces that are familiar and into a zone that is a dark tunnel of strangeness. She is trying hard to find someone. Who? She doesn’t know who. And as fifteen and then twenty minutes pass, her leg movements become stronger and she starts to move her hands so that the shoebox begins slipping and very nearly falls to the floor.
The woman, Gretchen Smith, a pediatric nurse from Seattle who will eventually end up on the same plane as Katherine and the others and who will ask for help during the flight when her daughter gets ill and who will also slip a book into Katherine’s carry-on bag that is her textbook—the one she wrote on death and dying when the patient is young—so damn young—catches the box, Annie’s ashes, and then holds them just as gently as Katherine would have as the next forty-nine minutes Katherine sleeps and searches for the mystery person.
In her dream, Katherine has to climb up something very tall and she cannot rest. She moves as fast as she can and even though she does not know where she is supposed to be she’s desperate to get there. Later, when she is also on the plane and she finds the book tucked into her bag and the note that says: Letting go does not have to be just because of a death. People lose many things they once believed they would have forever. I am certain, without ever having met her, that Annie would have told you the same thing and she would have been there when you let go of the rope. Let go. I guarantee that you will not fall. Your new friend—Gretchen, she will remember the dream and will jump back inside of it to see what she is supposed to see and what that will bring her is something new, something that is not yet even a thought, something that might never have come to her if she had not been on a traveling funeral and asleep in an airport in Minnesota.
It will come to her months later when Gretchen calls and when they meet for lunch and when they become friends who connected during a traveling f
uneral and when Katherine finally realizes that she is ready to discover entire new parts of herself and to dust out all the corners of her life and see what’s back there, what she tossed in the closet and why she was sometimes afraid to turn on the light to help her find a new direction. They will wonder, then, these two new friends, if Annie was not at the Minneapolis airport and if the man, David the professor, did not predict yet another cosmic happening because of all the lives that crossed for just those few hours when the clouds drifted into each other, the planes took a nap, and the world waited for the skies to clear.
But first Gretchen spies Jill, Balinda, Laura, Marie and Rebecca looking frantically for Katherine who, they are certain, must be reorganizing the management plan for the entire airport. Gretchen points toward the seat next to her, puts her finger to her lips, and silently invites the women to sit.
Jill wants to wake Katherine because Balinda thinks she has decided to take a bus back to Chicago. The wild winds from the west have changed everything.
Balinda has twenty-five minutes to make up her mind for certain, get a seat, and get out of the airport before everyone else tries to get on the same bus and get back home before the end of the decade, before George W. Bush ends a war or starts another one, or before women are finally allowed to do whatever in the hell they want with their own damn bodies.
The women funeral warriors watch Katherine sleep for a good five minutes before anyone is brave enough to wake her. They watch her because she not only looks beyond adorable curled up in the plastic seats with just a small trickle of saliva running down her lips but because every single one of them realizes they are going to miss her fine wit, penchant for organizing and for telling people what to do in a way that is sweet and usually very thoughtful, and her kind heart.
“Damn it,” Jill says and in the back of her mind, way far back as she is searching and grabbing for whatever it is she is looking for, Katherine hears her and shifts her mind toward the light.
When she opens her eyes it takes her a moment, blinking under the lights, to realize where she is and what she is supposed to be doing.
“Annie,” she says instinctively, searching for the box.
Gretchen puts her hand on Katherine’s leg, hands over the box, and says, “Here she is. You fell asleep.”
“Thank you,” Katherine says and impetuously leans over to plant a kiss on Gretchen’s cheek. “I must have drifted off.”
“Just a bit,” Gretchen tells her. “You were dreaming like crazy. Was someone chasing you?”
“I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m drunk. Do I know you?” Katherine asks, looking blankly into her eyes.
“Not yet, but sort of. I just tucked you in, stood guard over Annie, and came to the funeral you just conducted in the airport terminal. That should get me past the door.”
They all laugh and Balinda bounces forward and tells Katherine she thinks that she must leave. She said it looks bleak for anything happening in Seattle—this day, at least—and she’s worried about her mother.
“It’s time,” Balinda explains. “I can be there before midnight if I hop on the bus. I think my mom needs to see me even though she can barely talk when I call. I think she needs me and I feel charged up and ready to go back.”
“Of course she needs you,” Laura tells her. “You go. We’ll all walk you to the pick-up spot.”
Balinda wants to go and she wants to stay. She tells them this as they press through groups that have formed at various points throughout the airport. There is a herd of people in front of every bar and they watch as one group has formed a fascinating process for a drink to get from deep inside of the bar to someone on the outer edges—it’s a dancing line of humans who stop whatever they are doing when someone shouts the word “Another” and a drink on a serving tray goes one way and the money for it on another tray goes the opposite way. Some are playing cards, a few kids are kicking a soccer ball up and down the escalator steps, and there are dozens of small squabbles and loud phone conversations going on everywhere.
“Awesome,” Laura decides as they gather around Balinda by the bus stop. “It’s like some third-world country or something in just a matter of hours.”
The women, Annie’s pallbearers, stand under the long overhang at the side of the airport because rain is blasting into the building from every conceivable angle and they plant Balinda in the center, protecting her, covering her with their arms and hands in a group hug that brings her to tears.
“This has been wonderful for me,” she tells them. “Thank you for letting me barge in, for talking to me, for making me feel as if I was meant to do this from the beginning. Thank you for letting me believe that I was a real part of the whole traveling funeral.”
The women tell her to stop it. They assure her that Annie would have had it no other way and neither would any of them. They tell her to call and write and Laura promises to bring her luggage when and if she makes it back to Chicago.
“I feel ready to open up the boundaries of my own world,” Balinda confesses as she leans into Laura’s arms. “It hasn’t been just my mother. It’s been me. There’s also something I want to ask you, something that would mean a lot to me.”
“What?” the women all ask at the same time.
“When it’s time, when my mother dies, will you all help me with a traveling funeral? Will you start to save your money so we can go to Poland and spread her around and dance along the rivers, drink dark beer, and see what it was that made her love it so much?”
Right there, at that very moment, Jencitia Chalwaski’s fabulous traveling funeral is conceived and the women close their eyes and see flocks of foreign birds drifting toward the center of a large lake, they can smell sausages cooking at roadside cafés and hear whistling barmen swishing beer into glasses the size of mixing bowls. They all fly to Poland, just then, and hear the whispers of Jencitia’s own mama saying, “Welcome home, baby girl,” and they feel the fingers of the past wrapping themselves around their shoulders so that they know, they really know, the connection of a place—Jencitia’s place—that has driven itself into the center of the dying woman’s heart.
“Oh . . .” Balinda sighs. “This makes me so happy. I am going to tell my mother too. I’m going to tell her that we will take her home.”
Marie and Balinda spend a quiet moment together alone before Balinda gets on the bus. Marie presses her phone numbers into Balinda’s hand and they both say, almost at the exact same time, “You are not in this dying business alone.” And then Balinda whispers, “Thank you,” into Marie’s ear and Marie whispers, “No, thank you,” into Balinda’s ear.
Jill, Marie, Katherine, Laura and Rebecca huddle together, arms crossing shoulders, hand in hand. They stay outside until the bus pulls away and all they can see are the vanishing taillights that blink at the turn and then disappear into a stream of water that resembles a sheet of white glass. Balinda stares out the back window of the bus for hours. She watches the wet skyline fade into fields of corn, suburban subdivisions and roadside gas stations and she imagines the women waiting at the terminal and honoring, until the very end, the spirit of Annie G. Freeman.
Six hours later when Balinda gets off the bus and takes a taxi straight to the care center where her mother is resting against a stack of pillows that have been strategically placed to help support her bad back, she stands in the doorway and places her hands across her mouth to suppress an emotional cry. It is a cry of love. She wants to run and throw herself on the bed and ask her mother to forgive her for every harsh and horrible thing she has ever said or thought. She wants to hold her mother in her arms like a baby and promise her—again—that she will take care of her until the day she dies. She wants to sing her mother a song in Polish and vow to her that she will take her home.
Balinda does sing and she does promise and when her mother wakes up two hours later and sees her there she reaches for her hand, grabs her wrists and pulls her right onto the bed and for the very first time in her li
fe says, “Come here, my baby,” to her daughter in English, and the two women huddle together as the storm floats to a halt, tired as hell, just the other side of downtown Chicago.
By ten P.M. Laura, Rebecca, Marie, Katherine and Jill have been at the airport for 12.3 hours and it is beyond obvious that there is no way in hell they are going to get to Seattle that day or maybe even the next day. The airport is still loaded with people who have now tired of drinking beer, playing cards and being happy about the odd sensation that comes with uncharted free time and being frivolous with what you share with total strangers, and they have descended into a grumpy aisle of tiredness that has many of them sleeping in places that make the entire terminal look like a war zone.
Marie has long since given up hope of watching the sun rise over the ocean islands. In her world of in-your-face reality, she has decided to make the most of the moment and throw down her cards first.
“Well, ladies,” she says. “Apparently we are going to have to come up with Plan B for this segment of the traveling funeral. What say ye?”
“We don’t know what to say,” Jill tells her. “We stink, we’re full of cheap-ass bagels and light beers and we’ve stumbled into that dangerous place of exhaustion called ‘Who the hell cares?’ ”
“I see,” Marie responds, standing with both her hands on her hips. “I’m a helper. So now I am going to help you by sending bold Katherine over to that desk, where she will ask for a room, travel vouchers and anything else she can get out of the almost bankrupt airlines people.”
Katherine is all set to be a hard-ass attorney but when she gets to the front of the desk, thirty minutes later, and sees the haggard attendant, stacks of paperwork, piles of coffee cups, and the line of furious people behind her, she cannot do it.
“People don’t realize we can’t control the weather,” the attendant confides as she stamps out a voucher for a room at the Sheraton. “I appreciate you being nice. I’ve got to get a new job.”
